The growing popularity of the Internet and other computer networks has resulted in widespread development and use of application-based network services provided over a network. These services implement important functions for businesses which have a presence on the computer networks. Accordingly, businesses spend resources to develop and manage these network services.
Managing network services can include entering quality control agreements for the services they provide, such as a service level agreement (SLA) or an operating level agreement (OLA). An SLA is an agreement between a user of a network service and a provider of the service. Under an SLA, the service provider agrees to meet certain quality thresholds for the level of service provided to a particular user. For example, an SLA may indicate that a certain transaction provided by a network service provider to a user must have an average response time of one second or less over a month. An OLA specifies a performance threshold to be satisfied by a service provided between internal entities of a network service system. For example, an OLA may specify a response time threshold to be satisfied by a backend service when processing a request from a particular application server. The SLA and OLA terminology is associated with the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), a globally recognized collection of best practices for information technology (IT) service management.
Because SLAs and OLAs are entered between different entities, address different types of data and involve different thresholds, the agreements are not linked together. As such, an administrator must manually search through and select an SLA and an OLA to attempt to address related failures. SLA and OLA failures may be close together in time, but an administrator will still not know if the failures are truly related. Further, an SLA usually addresses one or more related transactions with the network service from the point of view of the user and an OLA usually addresses a type of internal transaction from the point of view of a backend. Thus, because the data provided by an OLA can be for several applications in communication with a backend, it is difficult to determine a specific cause of a performance problem using OLA related application runtime data and SLA traffic monitoring data.